The Lonely Year
by Evil Riggs
Summary: Final Fantasy VI: What if Celes had woken much earlier from her coma? An in-depth, grit-choked reconsideration of the year spent by Celes and Cid on that lonely island, in the wake of the end of the world. A descent into terror, madness, and blind hope.
1. Day 0

**THE LONELY YEAR**

**Day 0**

The end of the world comes to her in a series of stolen moments, lit by boiling flashes that erupt through the clouds.

There: A piece of scaffold shines as it comes apart, individual pieces of brass stretching, shrieking, and fragmenting in midair.

She feels her cloak wrench at her shoulders. The gold clasp digs at the hollow of her throat with an animalistic neediness, and then the whole garment whips away from her body and out into the void.

And there: A long, pale face frozen in a moment of horror and dread realization. Corn-white hair flows behind it as if caught in the flow of a river.

She turns end over end in darkness; is struck with vertigo like a hammer-blow; feels a moan gargling deep in her throat; clenches as her stomach contents boil and churn.

And there: A swarm of broken timber careens through the sky. A hail of bolts and nails and washers. Steam pipes, bent and cracked as ancient bamboo, spin downward toward black ripples run through with racing bolts of fire.

She cannot hear her own cries over the maddened shriek of the wind, much less those of the others. Her mind is consumed with a ceaseless, panicked roar. In the cold and spinning dark, she can feel her vocal cords stretch and twang and resonate, yet there is no sound. Throat aching, body howling, she clutches blind and mute for something, anything, to steady herself. Something hot and pliant passes over her palm—_skin? someone else? please? take my hand!_—and then it's gone, a ghost in the endless freefalling dark.

And there: She sees one of the deckhands—those fine and largely nameless men who work the _Blackjack_'s engines and corridors—tumbling through the air, arms flailing, sweat and tears streaming in a glittering arc behind him. Something massive rushes through the air above her. In the next burst of light she sees a whirling mass of deck plating, scything through the sky like a meteor. Time enough to see the deckhand's eyes widen as the jagged iron missile strikes him mid-torso and then continues, slick and unstoppable. The deckhand's body falls apart in a cloudburst of red, intestines unraveling from each bisected half like pink and gray ribbons.

In the dark again. The vertigo inescapable, implacable. She can't tell which is worse: The intensity of the sensation, or the drawn-out length of it. She has no idea how long she has fallen. Seconds? Minutes? Time is meaningless beyond those singular moments of light, caught like insects in amber.

_I need to—if only I can—_

Something hard and heavy and redolent of machine oil ricochets off her shoulder. She senses the crack of splintering bone.

For all the chaos that suffuses the world, this time she finally hears her own voice, screaming.

And there: In a coruscating barrage of light, a dozen silhouettes twirl, spin, careen, and dance—falling. They float through an endless howling abyss of churning clouds and glowing paths of red fire. Their limp bodies sail through a rain of jagged metal, splintered timbers, and shimmering glass. Their forms trail blood and sputtering, wisp-thin nebulae of desperate magic. She thinks she sees a flash of emerald—_that beautiful, improbable, Esperborn hair—_and a pair of arms raised as if in supplication.

_Oh_, she thinks. _Oh, gods. Not like this._

Some updraft or burst of wind catches her, flips her, directs her eyes into the idiot rage of the burning sky. Pain like a colossus drives itself from her fractured shoulder and into her body. Thought ceases. She screams and screams. Some final, dying corner of her mind curses herself for her helplessness.

She senses something _part_. She feels a wet, gentle _push _on the small of her back. A static-laden sigh fills her ears. Suddenly, the air about her is thin, cold, and crisp as diamond. The pain grasps her by the head and forces shut her eyes.

She smells the sea.


	2. Day 1

**Day 1**

_choking burning hurts it hurts_

Reek of salt, sulfur, rotting scales, stone-held pools.

_breathe can't breathe oh hurts gods please why can't_

Cacophony. Crashes, moans, shrieks. A feral, omnipresent rumble. Liquid drumming. A bass trumpeting that resounds and resounds.

_why can't_

Liquid ice. Flesh slick; soaked through. A gray sensation. Heat ebbing away into nothing—into freezing darkness.

_why can't I oh gods I need I need to ooooh _shit _it hurts_

A whisper-slip of wet cloth. Tromp of boots on rock. Squelch of rubber and leather. Something immense roars and groans and cracks apart, the sound echoing from some unfathomably distant horizon.

"Ah, lords. Ah, gods in their heaven."

_hurts my head my arm my oh gods hurts my arm my mind why can't I _think

"What have I . . . ah. Ah _no_. I knew . . ."

Flutter of eyelids. A face, framed in yellow. Washed out, blurred, swimming with pain-crackling unfocus.

"Oh, darling. My sweet Celes." The voice echoes and warbles as if spoken underwater. "Your . . . don't, don't _move_. Your . . ."

_so familiar that voice is so familiar_

The face, the mad sounds, the overpowering stench: It all drowns in static. A howl like a steel beam rent in two fills the world. A basso scream follows, then_—_

_I'm smothering choking smoke water drowning oh shit please_

The final sensation: Panic. Mindless, formless, snapping out like a wounded animal. Grasping, gripping, undulating, senseless.

_going to die I'm broken and dying and hurts it chokes I can't breathe I can't I can't I I I I please let me just—oh _Locke

And then nothing. Just darkness.


	3. Day 8

**Day 8**

Though she isn't certain how she came to be here, Celes Chere is delighted to find herself sitting on the patio of the Imp Wing Inn.

One can hardly fault Vector for its lack of general charm. It is a blunt, ugly city, made majestic only by the awesome scale of its engineering and ambition. It is not made grand by aesthetics, but by the distant, liquid boom of cracker towers; the radiating webs of suspended railways; the click-clacking wind tunnels woven by high-speed trains; the high growl of gyrothopters bumbling through the sky; plumes of steam and cinders, rising hundreds of meters from already-colossal smokestacks; iron-bedded barges hauling coke, oil, cattle, and timber through the twilight of the Tunnel Canals; the brooding concrete and steel hulks of tenement blocks; the ceaseless turn and roar of ventilation fans the size of behemoths; the lockstep thunder of military exhibitions as thousands of armored soldiers tromp the cobblestones of the Grand Avenue; the brilliant crimson banners of the Empire, fluttering from every flagpole and on high. All these things inspire awe, dread, and repulsion in uneasy, equal measure. Even the cyclopean ziggurat of the Imperial Palace seems more pragmatic than august; more oppressive than magnificent. This is a city built for engineers and barons of industry. An oil-dripping, lead-coated capital for a steel-hearted nation.

This is where Celes was born. This is where she was raised. Vector's industrial excess grew with her. They both flowered into cold resplendence at nearly the same time. This was _her _city, once upon a time. As a child, she played on its streets and rails and shadowed rooftops. The crash of pistons and muffled roar of furnaces were her lullabies. In the sterile bowels of the Magitek facility that remade her—transformed her into something strange and strong and sublime—she took comfort in the sounds of the city as they seeped through the metal walls.

Now, Celes cannot help but feel a little repelled by the place.

After all, it has been some years since she set out into the world carrying the banner of the Empire. Long days have passed between the time she knew only Vector and its rusting canyons and when she stood tall over the smoking wrecks of other city-states. Ever since her own fall from grace (_my failure my great and terrible failure_), Celes has walked the world with eyes ever wider.

Arm in arm with men and women she would have killed thoughtlessly just months earlier, Celes has traveled the breadth of the world. She has slept in regal parlors and beneath the dripping boughs of damp, cavernous forests. She has blundered through refugee tunnels, shivered against the dry bite of glacial winds, and climbed breathlessly through immense canyons. She has beheld the gray, anarchic, failed urban swath of Zozo; wandered the warmly lit, baroque districts of Jidoor; tasted the sweet and spicy desert foods of Figaro; stood watch over the crumbling spires and depressed shanty avenues of Maranda. Celes has hidden and been hidden; tortured and been tortured; been welcomed and condemned; fought and fallen; killed and healed.

_Mostly killed_, she thinks, with a still-fetal species of regret.

Because of all these experiences—all those locales and all the faces that moved through them—Celes knows that she has become a better, fuller person. At the same time, it honestly pains her that the return to the city of her birth has been rendered so much poorer by all those strange sights and encounters. She can't help but see Vector now as the rest of the world does: Artless and unpleasant.

Even so, Celes has to admit that there are bright patches even in the fetid, churning shadow of Vector. The Imp Wing Inn, though situated on the outskirts of the expansive city, remains one of the great untouched pleasures of the metropolis. The inn is nestled in the ramshackle maze of burgher neighborhoods that crowd up on the bluffs that form Vector's northern edge. It squats amid the slate roofs and bulging walls of homes occupied by clerks, speculators, propagandists, engineers, coal merchants, and retired officers. The Imp Wing is older than any of them, its damp stone foundations laid when Vector was little more than a marshy collection of trading posts squatting at a confluence of pre-Magi canals. Long after the camps became towns and the towns had expanded into a city-state and the city-state had proclaimed the birth of its Empire, the homes and shops popped up around the Imp Wing Inn like mushrooms after a downpour. The rapidly expanding city needed space for its new class of tradesmen; it overflowed its borders and spilled out onto land not usually considered viable for construction. Thus, the nonsensical rows and curlicues of cheap housing that crowd in on the inn like revelers in an overstuffed party.

In those ironclad days after she emerged from the Magitek facility and its attendant academy, Celes found herself brought to the Imp Wing by a boisterous group of fellow officers. They had been an eclectic mix of pilots and engineers, trying vainly to crack the frozen veneer of this weird, somber woman they found in their ranks. For all their efforts that night, they were rewarded with little—a few answered questions, a pair of cautiously offered observations, the wary hint of a smile. The officers had left the inn with no more knowledge of this new breed of soldier than when they had entered. Stymied, they never asked Celes to accompany them again.

In spite of this, Celes returned to the Imp Wing Inn alone the following week. Despite the awkwardness of that first evening—wedged up against a stone wall and buffeted by the inane prattle of burghers masquerading as military men—Celes had developed an odd affection for the place.

She enjoyed the establishment in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. Despite her willowy body, Celes found it difficult and costly to become intoxicated (in any case, she found the loose, nauseous sensation extremely unpleasant). As such, she didn't come to the Imp Wing for the stolid wall of casks and kegs behind its bar counter. Nonetheless, Celes tended to order a snifter of port wine when she came to the little pub, sipping it with some nebulous, nameless pleasure. She would retire to the inn's patio and recline in one of its wrought-iron chairs, arching her neck and watching the bustle of the merchant neighborhood. On autumn days she would wait for the cool breeze, laced through with the smell of coal grease and chimney smoke, and smile silently as it rifled through her hair. In the summer, she took tall glasses of lemonade outside and drank them as the heat exploded from the cobbles.

Celes shared these moments with no one but herself. As she was deployed more and more to field operations, rising quickly through the imperial ranks, they became rarer and more precious. When Celes had been promoted to General amid basso pomp and ceremony, those brief lonely visits to the Imp Wing stopped entirely.

Then came long days and nights of war. Sword in hand; revolver at her side. Great fires in the distance, shining through the dark. Pistons, engines, drive shafts, flywheels. The blue-white flare of offensive magic, crackling cold and merciless through her fingertips. Ash-smeared faces gazing up at her passing, slack with despair. Nights increasingly sleepless. That new, insidious, maddening emotion, so completely alien that it was terrifying: Doubt.

Celes frowns. The memories are a cascade, showering through her like the shards of a broken mirror. Points of light and pulsating shadow. Meaningless now; long since battered into curious irrelevance.

And yet.

(She can't help but think her clothes are too tight, itching abominably against her skin)

And yet, here she is. Beneath the dust-blue vault of an immense sky, Celes leans into the reassuring iron back of her chair. On the scuffed surface of the table before her rests a thin glass of water. Moisture dribbles along its outer surface and pools radiant at its base. A pigeon coos idiotically to itself as it bobs about the periphery of the patio, searching out crumbs. Somewhere out in the winding streets of Vector, a burgher housewife cackles hysterically and calls a name twice.

It is quite hot. Celes can feel sweat beading on her brow and neck.

She considers the table, the glass, the crystalline water. Undulating shapes like red eels are reflected within the liquid. Flags flapping from the overhang of the inn's roof. At last, Celes realizes that she is not alone.

(Her throat, raw; her lips, numb.)

_He _sits across from her. His slender fingers fan across the table edge. He wears a wry little smile, as if preparing to tell a private joke. Sinewy; undeniably handsome; a face that has a hint of roughcut bastard to it. He smells lightly of sand, body odor, old leather, and something exotic—like ancient spices found sealed in a clay urn. The angle of the sun and the lean of the inn inundate his eyes in shadow.

The mere sight of him causes her insides to tremble. For all her confusion and affected sangfroid, she feels a coy and sheepish grin tug at her lips.

_Gods._

(Her mouth is so dry.)

They simply sit there, each holding the other's gaze, for some minutes. Woman and man; soldier and thief. A stifling wind comes rippling down the neighborhood streets and kicks up bits of paper litter. A watchdog chuffs irritably. The unseen woman laughs again and calls that garbled name like an incantation. Celes considers taking a drink of water, but dares not break the moment. When at last her companion leans forward, her breath catches in her chest and stays there, skittering.

(Why does her skin itch so badly?)

_Hello, _he mouths.

"Hello," she says.

He opens his lips, seems to consider, and then mouths something silently.

Celes blinks. "Excuse me? I can't . . ."

_It will hurt_, he repeats, voiceless.

"What?"

_It will hurt to lose us_.

Celes shakes her head. "I don't understand."

_You will. You already do._

The thin light that falls across them seems to shift in tone, becoming redder, sallower. Shadows drift across the patio. Celes shakes her head and blinks. Optical illusions. Visual phantoms.

(So dry.)

Celes wants to raise a hand from her lap and take a drink, but does not. The water taunts her. She eyes the curve of the glass, feels thirst tug at her throat, and glances back at the man sitting across from her. Though she can't clearly see his eyes, she can tell that he looks at her with a kind of patient frustration.

"What are you doing here?" she asks. "What are _we _doing here?"

He shrugs. _You don't know? _he mouths.

The inn's patio overlooks the street. Below, a big manx cat lopes past. Yellowish spittle foams over its jaws.

The thief leans back. He flicks a quick, dismissive hand into the air as if to say, _Ah, but such is life._ The dull waxwork of his face splits with a knowing, tooth-filled smirk. He says nothing.

"What are you trying to say?" Celes demands. "Why are you acting like this? Why are we here?" Without even realizing it, her voice has climbed into an imperious shout. "Answer me! I order you to answer me!"

An air siren blows a pair of mournful notes, emits a choked, shrill noise, and then goes silent. That unseen woman laughs and laughs.

The thief just smiles—sadly now, it seems—and doesn't utter a word. He folds his hands in his lap and looks at her with inexplicable pity.

(An ache; a desire; a memory of terror.)

Celes moves to stand. At least, she tries to. Her feet and thighs seem to have gone numb and useless.

_I'm so sorry, _he mouths.

Her muscles twitch with a jolt of fear like a cleaver. "Why won't you speak?" Celes asks. Without even knowing it, her voice has dropped to a hoarse whimper.

_Isn't it obvious?_

(Throat, sand; tongue, stone.)

A bass vibration—soundless but subtly intense—rolls through the stone surface of the patio. A single gray cloud races across the sun. The burgher woman, lost like a phantom amid the labyrinthine Vector streets, laughs like she is screaming. A droplet slides down the glass of water lazily, unhurried, mocking.

"I don't understand," Celes whispers. "What is happening? Why are we here? Why are you acting like this?"

_Why can't I just take a drink? _she thinks, with an awful and revelatory finality.

The thief regards her with fond melancholy and spreads his arms, as if the answer is patently obvious. The sky rumbles thunder, though there are no clouds. A languid gust of wind brings with it a smell that is sharp and sulfurous.

_I'm dead_, he says silently. We're_ dead, actually. Both of us. All of us. We failed._

"No," Celes murmurs.

_We failed and we died, _he continues. _For all our efforts, we couldn't stop the inevitable. And we died. We died. We died. We died. We are dead and we are in Hell._

"Stop it."

Celes wants a sip of water so badly that it literally hurts. Her tongue aches. Her esophagus trembles. Her stomach clenches. Suddenly, she becomes aware of a dull agony that pulses through her body like a squalid curse. Celes realizes that she is, in some fundamental way, broken. She looks at the glass of water before her like a shining oasis. Untouchable salvation. An apocalyptic longing, saturating her and compelling her to weep.

_We failed._

"Shut up!"

_You failed._

His lips don't even move now. His faces lays frozen. His skin is glass.

In the sky, a darkness. Somewhere; everywhere. A graying line that jags across the rooftops. A sound like ten-thousand engines. From the street surface rises a reek of charring flesh.

(Oh gods, please save me.)

Celes tries to stand and fails. She tries to raise a hand and fails. She tries to look away from the paralyzed ingratiating face across the table from her, and fails. She tries to cry out—"LOCKE!"—but the syllable is drowned out by the world-ending howl that descends from the sky.

The shadow resolves. A black, roiling pall bulges across the horizon. Flickering lines of angry red and orange run through it like arteries. An oncoming tidal wave of volcanic ash. Unstoppable annihilation, given form and terrible purpose.

"Locke! Please!" Her words fail her, swallowed up in the roar of the impending conflagration.

It draws close. Roof shingles glow hot and burst into flame. Streetlamps sway, crack, and tip over. Swarms of sparks and embers float through a sky blue and black as a fresh contusion. The thief stares at her impassively as a sculpture, his body still and beatific.

She tries to rise, but cannot. She tries to scream, but cannot. The veil of ash descends, ripping apart rooftops and pulverizing stone. It spins up around the patio with a wail. Scorching tendrils of smoke whip around her and press the breath from her lungs.

Across from her, Locke explodes. His face shatters in a spray of jagged porcelain.

The ash cloud falls, crushing her into the earth. It brings with it an all-consuming, insensate nothingness.


	4. Day 12

**Day 12**

"There. Yes. There, now. Good."

Cool, trickling. Beading, wet.

"Isn't that better?"

Raw, dry. Itching? Better. Flowful, filling. Sharp, cool. Crisp. Fine. Better.

"Oh, you dear. Can you . . . ? No. Of course not."

Warm. Immediate, overwhelming. Hot. Feverish, itchy, twitching. Raw. Cracked. Broken? Broken. Jagged. Radiant, painful.

"You still hold on. Gods bless you. If only you knew. Do you dream? I think that you must dream. I am not certain of myself, really. I think that I see you move, dreaming. Struggling. Holding on so tight, so tenacious. Just like that stubborn little girl, all those years ago. Grabbing onto a task and refusing to back down until she mastered it. 'The Blonde Bulldog,' they called you. The other researchers, I mean. Bastards, the lot of them. But right, in their way."

Fuzzy. Perplexing. Dreaming? Incomprehensible. Unknowable. Hot. Painful. Raw. Broken.

"I was not young, then, but I felt like it. The whole world's progress, moving beneath my fingertips. Its pulse under my command. You and the others were so bright and so full of potential. Keys to open the secret doors of the world.

"Damn me for a fool. I was so idiotically blind. So willfully deaf. Lied to myself about where all of it would take us. And now . . . now look at us. Look at _all this_."

Windy, hot, reeking. Incomprehensible.

"I'm so tired. Haven't slept in two days. No sleep, for fear of waking up to find you gone. Fearful that you will have finally have done the sensible thing and let go. Or . . . or maybe. Hnf. Maybe I'm just scared of what's happened. Still trying to take it all in. I'm frightened of what's beyond the windows. Well. Why shouldn't I be?"

Incomprehensible. Raspy. Itching, rising, baleful.

"Gods. I'm just talking to myself, aren't I? I need to sleep. I need to . . . oh. Oh, _gods_. I don't even know. I need to stop talking."

Elsewhere, everywhere: Rumbling, rattling, roaring. Thunderous. Howling, whirling, crackling. Ragged. Echoing.

"There it is again."

Reverberating. Toilsome. Itching, expanding, thick, agonizing. Recursive. Annihilative. Unbearable. _Unbearable. _Mournful rising voiceless roaring terrible voiced rattling scorching raw—

"I—oh! Celes. Try and—please—can you hear me? Don't. Try not to—you aren't awake, are you? Please. One moment. One moment. Please hold on. Never heard . . ."

Fumbling falling painful painful hot unbearable incomprehensible yawning abyssal terrible—

"Here. Here! Please, quiet. Calm, quiet. This will—oh gods, so little left. This will help. Drink. Open your mouth. Drink it."

Agonizing agonizing warm sloppy cloying rolling awkward oily bitter slidesome slurpsome terrible te—numbing. Fuzzy. Oh—roiling—toiling—oiling. Itchy. Darkening. Fuzzier. Fuzzsome. Descending. Spinning. Spinsome. Descendsome. Fallsome. Spiscending. Spifuzz—

"There. There now. Better. Much better."

. . . incomprehensible . . .


	5. Day 15

**Day 15**

When she opens her eyes, it is with a sense of something half-remembered, unnerving, forbidden, and tenebrous. An unpleasant, uncanny impression. Blinking is an action fraught with anxiety. Acrid fragments of dreams linger behind her eyelids.

At first, there are only single and separate impressions. Scents without tastes; tactile scrapings devoid of sound. Sensations pile upon her in discreet layers.

She thinks that she is hungry. She is almost certain she is in pain. She cannot quite figure out if the vague tingling she senses is located down in her toes.

Into her nostrils creep smells of dust, whale oil, and old pine. Dry rot; dry grass; dry sand stuck between floorboards. An iodine twinge, suggesting the presence of sea water. Ghosts of fish fried in cast iron pans.

There come unpleasant and very close smells—bodily stinks that cause her nose to scrunch up and reject its own breath. Greasy skin; rank armpits; matted hair; fetid breath; unwashed nethers; cloth soaked in sweat and urine.

And shit. Somewhere, something reeks of shit.

When she opens her eyes, it is not only to her own uncertainty. Even the light that washes upon her flickers with a tentative, hesitant quality. It moves like oil over water, sliding across rough contours and splintered angles. A glow that shifts between the color of old daffodils and an overripe orange.

_Oranges. Gods, I haven't had an orange in ye_—

Dull, rasping, cudgel-like pain rolls through her abdomen. What erupts from her throat is neither cough nor moan. Briars sprout about her tongue and tonsils. Her shoulder fills with molten glass.

"Oh, dear. Dear dear dear. Oh my."

A voice—sounding at once distant and very near—warbles through the air, just audible over the groan still shuddering through her body.

Something looms above her, huge and pear-shaped against the meager light.

No—not something. Some_one_.

With his back to the quiver and flit of illumination, the man's features are not immediately visible. Just a man-shaped hole in the world, details just barely visible somewhere in its well-shadow depths. Then, with a series of crusty and inexplicably painful blinks, she is able to pull more and more of the man into focus.

He is balding, but not bald. Not _old _in the purest sense, but certainly sliding in that direction. Robin's egg blue eyes, situated over a bulbous slab of a nose. The wild bristles of his mustache alternate dusty brown and ginger red. Thin and bitterly contracted lips. About his torso is draped the rumpled remains of what once was quite the fashionable Jidoorian silk shirt. The man's large hands are clasped together as if in fervent prayer.

Cheeks trembling, brow pulled upward in a dunescape of distress, the man says, "C-ce . . . Celes? Is that . . .? Are you _awake_, child?" His voice is at once gruff and measured. Deep as a quarry and yet full of warmth.

_That's my name, _she thinks, and for a moment lies genuinely puzzled. She blinks up at the man and examines him—his unshaven chin and red-rimmed sclera and the untended tangle of his remaining hair. _Yes. That is my name. And I know his, too._

"Cid," she murmurs. Uttering that single syllable seems to run sandpaper up and down her throat.

Cid del Norte Marquez smiles gently, lines radiating out from the edges of his eyes. His hands part hesitantly and then hover, as if he is unsure of what to do with them.

"Oh," he says. "Oh."

Without warning, his form recedes from her field of vision. The soles of heavy boots thwack across bare floorboards. Cid's absence is so sudden that Celes wonders if she hallucinated him. Troubling.

And then, the bootfalls clunk and thump closer. The aging scientist leans across her, face scrunched with almost desperate concern. In one paw is balanced a smallish metal cup—the sort Celes slowly recognizes as originating from an Imperial Army-issue mess kit. Traces of moisture glimmer along the cup's rim as Cid tilts it toward her.

"Here. Please. Drink this. It will help."

She wants to reach for it. She tries to reach for it. Another wave of pain and stippled numbness sweeps through her body. Prickling spasms pounce up and down her arms. Celes feels her fingers claw at roughspun woolen blankets. Her heels dig into what may or may not be a sparsely packed horsehair mattress.

Cid says, "Easy, now. Don't. Don't try to move, just yet. Please don't." His features are all but etched with worry.

She relaxes almost unwillingly, her entire body sublimating sweat and seemingly boneless. Mouth parted in a dry pant as Cid tips the cup over her lips. Gentle as a nursemaid. Water flows over her lips and teeth and tongue. Tepid, sallow, slightly bitter. She can taste the flat, ferrous influence of the cup.

Yet, the water may as well be a beauteous elixir. In its wake, all things feel possible.

"There. There now," Cid says, pulling the cup back.

Celes rasps, "Come off it . . . old man. Not a child."

A pair of seal-bark laughs eject from this lips. His free hand swipes at the corners of his eyes, as if there are tears to be dried. There are none, but he continues the gesture all the same.

"And to think that I was sure you would never wake," he laughs. "Here, now, then. Here now. Always with teeth bared, eh? Here now. Do you want some more water?"

Celes manages a nod. Cid slips away again, boots still loud as hammers. The sounds of his activity seem to come from another country entirely. She stares up into the indistinct light as it plays across rough beams and rafters.

_Why am I like this? Why am I _here_? What is this place?_

How irritating, her inability to summon the reasons. How bothersome the fog of confusion and fatigue still oozing about her head.

_There was a man_, Celes thinks. _A door splintering as it fell open. And a . . . wait. That was months ago, wasn't it? Months and miles and many battles. What happened between then and now?_

Somewhere, a gust of wind moans as it pushes beneath a doorjamb or window casement. Not a memory—the sound of it is here and now and feels much closer than Cid's busy noises. Wood groans in the bleary twilight.

And it comes back to her.

All the green bottles of beer consumed in well-appointed cavern hideouts; hard marches along coniferous woodland trails; rusting old equipment repaired and repurposed; steam tunnels shimmied through like urban serpents; locks jimmied; throats cut so that the jet of blood spilled under armor, rather than over it; lips moved to achingly beautiful songs being sung just offstage; freezing atmospheric wind and chill fingers wrapped about brass railings; hydraulic basso stomps of Magitek weaponry; hair standing on end amidst micro-storms of sorcerous intent; the incomprehensibly overwhelming roar of splitting earth; stink of charred flesh and melting fat; the weight of a dozen different swords and sabers balanced in her hands.

Her treason. Her torture. Her rescue. Her turn. Her doubt. Her gambit. Her embrace.

Gods. Monsters. Terrible machines. Grasping tyrants. Old friends slain. Lost Continent, lost no more. Fanatics. Madmen.

_Madmen_.

With a gasp and the sensation of molars grinding together, it comes back. It all comes back. Everything returns like the casual backhand slap of some listless giant.

Celes remembers skidding across the deck of the _Blackjack _with antediluvian mud still sticky upon her boot heels. Her heart not so much in her throat as somewhere just behind her uvula, pounding and pounding and pounding. About her, surviving Returners dashed to and fro with expressions of pale despair, some helping the deck crew to prepare the airship for a hasty departure. Engines already roaring to life, kicking up whirlwinds of dust and smoke. She had seen the King and his brother hoofing it toward the bridge, each limping on a different foot. And there: Locke, moving like an agitated spider amidships, mouthing something inaudible—

Then came a sound—greater even than the incessant bass temblor that had filled her ears as they retreated from those canyons of twisted coral and volcanic stone. A crash that seemed to rend the entirety of the world. Celes recalls the overwhelming shadow, then the burst of illumination that washed away all shapes and colors. She can almost feel the sensation of her feet leaving the deck and her innards suddenly rising up and the nasty scrabbling panic that pierces the abdomen just before true freefall.

And then the end of the world came to her in a series of stolen moments, lit by boiling flashes that erupted through the clouds.

"Oh, gods," she whispers.

"Celes?" Cid looms across her, steel cup hesitant in one hand. "Are you all right? Do you need—?"

She cuts him off with a word that she has to repeat twice. Her first attempt comes out as nothing but an agonized hiss between clenched teeth. "How?"

Without answering, Cid ministers to her with the water. As she curls her lips over the cup with an almost infantile greed, he says, "Come again?"

"The continent. How . . . how did . . .?"

His smile is at once warm and wan and guileless. "Oh, I'm more resourceful than you might imagine, my dear. In all the commotion, I may have commandeered an emergency gyro for my own use. Events were in such motion that none of the dockmasters at the beachhead seemed to notice. To both of our benefit, its storage compartments were packed to the brim with Imperial Air Force survival and field triage packets."

"Where are we?"

"I think it was . . . well, I think it may have been a fisherman's cabin. Or an outbuilding for a plantation. It's difficult to guess. All I know is that there isn't much here. Two rooms and a cellar, if you can call it that. More of a crawlspace dug out beneath the floorboards."

"Cid."

"Still," the scientist continues, "the foundation is stone and the construction is sound. Good, stout timber beams running under the roof and below the floor. Bell pine, if I'm not mistaken. And the design is quite elegant, if I may—"

"_Cid_!" she wheezes. "Where _are _we? What territory? Figaro? Are we . . ." Celes's skull swims with the effort of speaking. "What province of the Empire?"

He leans away from her without speaking. When he returns, the cup is gone and his features are once again badlands of disquiet.

"I don't know," Cid whispers.

"The others? Other Returners? Are they here?"

"I don't know. Which is to say: No, they are not here."

"And the _Blackjack_?"

"Destroyed, so far as I can tell. I landed here because I thought I was following an emergency flare. As it turned out, it was burning wreckage from what appeared to be your degenerate friend's airship." His mustache bristles with consternation. "And _you, _gods be good."

"Then the others must have survived," Celes heaves. "They must have . . . I think it was Terra. I think she managed to cast something—a spell to break our fall."

With as great a determination as she can muster: "We have to find them. Have to regroup and . . . and . . ."

All illumination bubbles and fades. Colors blur into one another. It feels as if the back of her head is falling backward through a great chasm that has opened in her pillow. It strikes Celes—with perfect clarity—that the fluttering wings spreading across the world are in fact her own spasming eyelids.

"Celes?! Ce—"

_No. Please, not again_.

_Control it. Breathe in and remember your blood loss training and control it._

Celes breathes, full and deep. Takes wide and gulping swallows of air. Tries to focus on Cid's indistinct silhouette and make it stop receding, as if he is being borne away by a train car.

Little by little, colors return and shapes regain their consistency. Those rapid-fire blinks lose their insistent quality. Her breathing slows.

"Gods be good," Cid says. His voice still seems to be coming from a long way off. "Please—be still. Do not overexert yourself. You have been gravely injured. When I first pulled you from the surf, I was almost certain that you wouldn't make it through the first night. Thank the gods for the Imperial Medical Service's over-planning when it comes to triage kits."

"Where are we? Where is everyone else?" Celes asks weakly. She hates how childish her voice sounds.

"Celes . . . I truly, truly do not know. Any of it. I have barely left your side since I found you on the shore. And those few times that I did, I have not ventured beyond this house's dooryard." In his voice is an exhaustion so deep it is excruciating.

"How long?"

"Hmm?"

"How long have I been abed? How long have I slept?"

The sound Cid makes as he thinks is almost wistful. "Oh—two weeks, now? If the days are—well, now. Well. Yes. It's been two weeks, plus or minus a day. I must admit that some of those days have bled together quite badly. I haven't been sleeping well. If at all."

There is a roar, a rush, thin and keening wail. Rattling glass; groaning beams. A dull vibration shivers through the mattress at Celes's back.

"A storm?" she asks.

"No."

"Don't understand."

The lamplight quavers as some slim and secretive draft works its way into the room. Unseen windowpanes pulse and shudder. A chill creeps over Celes's damp flesh.

Cid shakes his head and sighs, "It's been like this since . . ."

"Since what?"

"Since the continent collapsed. Since . . . _he _moved the statues."

She still doesn't understand. It's not an answer, really. About the both of them, walls creak and croak and mutter.

Trying to sound braver than she actually is, Celes asks, "What's happened, Cid? What's going on?"

"Please. Celes. Just try to get some rest. Waking up from _any _coma is astonishing, but after weeks? It's just short of a miracle. A gods-ordained miracle."

"This cabin?" she interjects.

"Yes?"

"There are windows. I can hear window glass, battered by the wind."

No response. Cid's hands have clasped about one another again, twisting palm to palm in the manner that has always shown her that he's become deeply nervous.

"Help me up," she declares. "I want to see outside."

Pitifully: "I don't believe that that is a sound idea, Celes. It is probable that you won't even be able to stand."

She says, "Then hold me up." When Cid says nothing—just gazes at her as if she is some kind of mongoloid child—Celes growls, "_Let me see_."

Some seconds more of reluctant hand-wringing pass. When he finally does move, Cid does so with a sure momentum that Celes still regards fondly. Not a big man or a strong man or a sure man, Cid—but once he is intent on a task, it will be accomplished without fail.

His fingers scrabble under blankets, forming a slippery grip on the skin of her left shoulder. Slowly, with gathering force, Cid presses her upward.

"You're gonna have to help me, now," he grunts.

There's not much help to give. Though she flexes her back muscles and tries to press down into the mattress with her palms, the effort is agonizing. Her eyes squeeze shut with pain.

When they open again, everything has changed. Up until this moment, her entire world has existed from only one viewpoint—falling in on upon her at a single angle. As her vision cants, turns, twists, and rights itself, the sensation of dissonance is almost unbearable.

Celes sits on the edge of a narrow bed, legs splayed awkwardly over the side, covers wrapped about her like a makeshift sarong. It only now comes to her that she was nude beneath the blankets—stripped of even the most tangential articles of clothing.

There is no shame or revulsion. After all, Cid personally gave her dozens of medical exams in the Magitek Research Facility. And if she truly has been asleep for weeks on end, he would have had to . . . _oh gods_.

_Of course_, she mulls bitterly. Now she knows why she smelled shit in the air upon waking.

She pushes away the thought and turns her gaze upon the room about her. Stark walls of wooden plank—whitewashed once upon a time, but now shabby and peeling.

A small table of rough—perhaps even amateur—construction squats near the bed. Atop it is the source of the room's light: a small lantern of glass and black tin. Judging by its make and the slow orange-white hue of its flame, Celes surmises that it's probably burning whale oil.

The floor is bare, each board warped and splintery in its own unique way. Across the room sits a chair of a better (though not much) make than the side table. Across its back is hung an aggressively yellow hooded poncho—the same one worn by Cid while he was stomping about the Lost Continent like a kid exploring a toy store. Spread about the base of the chair like a congregation of unruly worshippers are an assortment of paper wrappings, metal boxes, empty glass bottles, steel canteens, unspooled rolls of gauze, and a pair of deconstructed mess kits.

Off to the right sits the window. Cheap, warped, bubble-filled glass panes inset in a frame three times too expensive for the room around it.

Celes nods toward the portal. "Help me up," she commands.

Another spate of sweat-pouring punishment commences as Celes shimmies onto the floor. Her legs feel like marionette limbs, inanimate and beyond her control. With Cid's support, she is able to achieve the minor miracle of not immediately falling flat onto her face. She wobbles there, Cid's arm ironclad about her waist, every ounce of her weight seeming to crush down on the lifeless putty of her calves. Hot nails prod up and down her thighs. Even larger spikes work themselves slowly up under her kneecaps. Blankets draped about her like the uniform of a crazed ascetic.

She barely feels the soles of her feet as they scrape over the bare and filthy floorboards. To cross the five or six feet to the window takes some minutes. Cid accomplishes much of the work, more or less dragging Celes like a life-sized doll. The sounds he makes as the finally grabs the windowsill are blustery and winded.

Celes gazes out through the glass, into the world she left behind.

She blinks, unsure of whether her vision has fully adjusted.

There is nothing beyond the window. A blunt, literal, colorless void. Nothing but a blank and featureless veil, as if some fell curtain has been pulled down across the world. Utter blackness.

"Is it night, then?" she breathes.

"Most likely."

She eyes him—all red and disheveled. Expression tight and mournful. "Most likely?"

"It can be difficult to tell. Some days are better than others." He lets loose a mordant chuckle.

Outside, Celes can hear the wind swirling through unseen branches and along beds of invisible grass. Unknown detritus blows past noisily in the impenetrable dark.

Cid reaches out and taps a finger against the flawed, lumpen glass. He sighs, "I have not seen the sun for as long as you have been asleep."


End file.
